Focused assertion of identity: A typology of intensifiers

Abstract

Intensifiers such as himself/herself in English, ipse/ipsa in Latin, stesso/stessa in Italian, sam/samá in Russian, or selbst in German are most easily identifiable in terms of their prosodic and semantic properties. They are invariably in focus and therefore typically stressed, thus evoking specific types of alternative values. Based on a detailed discussion of the distribution and meaning of intensifiers in English, this article describes the major patterns of variation observable in the form of intensifiers across languages. Five types of intensifiers are distinguished on the basis of morpho-syntactic properties like inflection and agreement, and a number of implications and correlations between formal and distributional parameters of variation are pointed out.